Her sights are set on birds

Now an inveterate birder, Dianne Taggart was, admittedly, slow to migrate to world of ornithology.

"To be honest, I came late to the outside world at all," Taggart said. "I was in my 40s before I got interested in anything in nature."

As a child, Taggart liked staying indoors to read. Later, she was kept busy raising her daughter, working two jobs and going to college at night.

Despite her late start, Taggart, who retired from the Suffolk County Department of Public Works, is making up for lost time, sharing her knowledge and passion for the avian world through presentations at libraries and Audubon chapters and her "LI Birds.Com" Facebook group, where bird lovers flock to share photos, sightings and conversation.

"There’s these tiny little creatures that survive in all kinds of habitats and travel so many distances when they migrate. That’s just fascinating," said Taggart, 74, of Holbrook.

An abiding passion

When her daughter was young, Taggart put up a bird feeder in the backyard to entertain her. Over time, she found herself getting more and more curious about the winged creatures that stopped by. Her interest and admiration were piqued, she says, by a one-legged European starling that managed to return to the feeder for consecutive winters from the late ’70s into early 1980.

"That this tiny little ball of fluff managed to survive with only one leg was a testament to adaptability in nature," Taggart said.

Another pivotal moment for the budding bird lover occurred while she worked as a volunteer coordinator for Okeanos Ocean Research Foundation’s stranding program, which treated distressed marine mammals and turtles, and is now part of the Long Island Aquarium. After an oil spill near the northeastern coast of Long Island in the 1990s, Taggart helped clean and care for such seabirds as common murres, razorbills, common loons and dovekies. Once cleaned, the birds are kept in tanks with wide ledges on which they can perch from time to time to get out of the water.

"When you clean a bird, it doesn’t have any buoyancy anymore. So, until those oils grow back on its feathers, it can’t swim," she explained, adding that one of the murres died as she tended to it.

Noting the beauty and wonder of her feathered friends, Taggart says she has always been content to observe them.

"A lot of birders are listers and chasers," she said. "I’m not so much interested in keeping a list of the birds I see as I am in watching the birds. I think their behavior and their general survival is fascinating."

A chickadee, for example, is a remarkable little creature, she says. "They’re so light, and all feathers and hollow bones, and yet they manage to survive in weather that we couldn’t survive in without layers and layers of clothes."

Birding on LI

For years, armed with camera and binoculars, Taggart would spend each day birding, either during brief ambles after work or unhurried sojourns into the woods on weekends.

"I could go out on a Saturday morning and it would be five hours before I realized what time it was and my stomach was telling me I was hungry," she said.

These days, Taggart goes birding a couple of times a week to such favorite spots as Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge in Shirley or to Connetquot River, Heckscher or Sunken Meadow state parks. She also whiles away hours watching the flurry of activity at two feeders that she keeps far from windows at home to avoid strikes; she fills them with shelled sunflower seeds to attract a variety of birds.

For Taggart, birding is akin to meditation — a time where her mind is focused solely on birds and "all my worries or problems or thoughts just disappear for that period of time."

Beyond Long Island, Taggart has taken birding trips throughout the country and abroad, photographing brilliantly hued Brazilian birds, "amazing" hawks of Africa and an elusive cave-dwelling oilbird in Trinidad. In Tanzania, the secretary bird, with its halolike plume of black feathers, was particularly memorable.

"It’s a big, gawky storklike bird that walks around on the grasslands. It’s just so different," she said.

On her Trinidad trip, Taggart traveled with Eileen Schwinn, a fellow Eastern Long Island Audubon member. A highlight of that trip, Schwinn recalled, was pointing out to the guide a black-and-white warbler.

"Here in New York, that’s a pretty common bird in the springtime and summer," said Schwinn 72, a retired office manager who lives in East Quoque. "But our guide was just absolutely delighted that we found one for him, and he had never seen that before."

Locally, Taggart has had some exciting, even hair-raising, avian encounters. Once while she was sitting on her balcony, a tufted titmouse landed on her head and started pulling out her hair, apparently for nesting material. Another time, a great blue heron, who was being chased by a territorial osprey, swooped toward her at Wertheim.

"It didn’t see me, and it was coming right at me," Taggart recalled. "And I was frozen in place, and I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to get speared with that bill.’ "

At the last moment, the heron spotted her and veered away, sparing her from being impaled.

Taggart's favorite bird is the male northern harrier, a white-and-gray hawk with black wing tips and an owl-like face known as the "gray ghost." "It hunts like an owl, more like an owl than hawk, because it uses its hearing a lot and it nests close to the ground," she explained.

She’s never captured a good shot of the gray ghost, since, she says, she’s so busy admiring it. "I’m a birder first and a photographer way second," she said. "Three quarters of good bird photography is pure luck — being in the right place at the right time."

Spreading the word

For the past few years, Taggart has shared her appreciation of birds during presentations that include esoteric facts, engaging photos and audio recordings.

Once she became a dedicated bird enthusiast, Taggart always seemed to be throwing in tidbits of information about birds, whether while training Red Cross volunteers (begun after the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800) or leading volunteer stranding team sessions. She also shares her avian hobby with the Crochet for Charity group she coordinates.

"I want them to look around and appreciate what’s right in front of them," she said.

Among the advice she gives people: Don’t feed ducks (doing so spreads and causes diseases), and don’t chase birds or play bird calls to attract them (both activities stress for the animals).

Over time, Taggart has learned a thing or two from these feathered creatures. "They taught me to appreciate the outside world," she said. "They taught me the beauty that’s around me in these little, tiny things."

The most invaluable lesson she’s gleaned from her winged friends? The serenity of just being. "You go out and you take a walk in the woods, and you’re just there," she said. "And the birds are just there. It’s amazing to watch them do their thing and to realize that you can just do your thing, too. You can just be."

Taggart shares her concerns that climate change is causing birds to lose habitat and change migratory patterns. "Some don’t leave as quickly as they used to because our winters are warmer," she said, explaining that it takes longer for the birds to get cold enough to migrate.

One solution, she says, is creating other habitats for birds by preserving open space, grassland and forested areas. "All habitats are in trouble, from winter grounds in South America to nesting sites further north and along the migration routes where they need to rest and refuel," Taggart said.

Individuals can help by becoming citizen scientists who participate in such events as the Great Backyard Bird Count, which helps Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon monitor and aid bird populations. (Visit birdcount.org to register for this year’s event, Feb. 18-21.)

Eileen Gerle, who worked with Taggart at Okeanos and led educational programs for Cornell Cooperative Extension, noted that in Florida, the Venice Area Audubon Society’s 2021 Christmas Bird Count found the same number of species but 10,000 fewer birds as in 2020.

"We’re seeing declines worldwide within the bird population," said Gerle, 68, who now lives in Venice. "We’re seeing the same birds, just a lot less of them."

Gerle says Taggart’s talks and activism can help others develop an appreciation for birds that leads to conservation efforts. "You need that interest first for them to care enough to maybe donate to the Nature Conservancy which buys up land to help the habitat," she said.

Indeed, birds can be bellwethers of the quality of the global environment, letting humans know about the deleterious effects of pesticides and climate change, explains John Turner, 66, of Setauket, a naturalist and retired director of Brookhaven Town’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Armed with information, people can protect the bird population, he said.

"Dianne does a wonderful job as an avian ambassador to the public to inform them about these issues that relate to birds," said Turner, who runs Alula Birding & Natural History Tours of East Setauket.

Though she may have come late to the natural world, Taggart’s appreciation for all creatures — great and small — seems boundless.

"I think if I had to live life over again," she mused, " … I’d just sit and watch animals all day long."

Dianne Taggart displays photos she snapped during her excursions as she speaks about her avian friends. Her subjects include an osprey,  a great blue heron and a tufted titmouse. | Photos by Dianne Taggart